"Microsoft has been absolutely pummeled in the press and in reader comments this week by pundits and customers alike. They feel cheated by the amount of free storage space available to them on the new line of Surface Pro devices. But is that criticism fair or even valid?" Spoiler alert: turns out, it isn't. Both devices have about the same free space available, and by creating a USB restore drive for Windows on the Surface, you can actually get a little more on the Surface Pro. Interestingly enough, Microsoft confirmed on Reddit that their original numbers - which caused the ruckus - were wrong, because they were based on pre-production hardware, with debug code and other additional stuff on it. Oh Microsoft.

Not only tablet or phone OSes are smaller, but also full blown desktop OS can be much, much smaller. Yes, of course I am speaking about Linux. 2 GB will give you a nice systems with all the bells & whistles plus a great selection of apps.

You can go even smaller than that. I've had a fully functional, GUI driven modern desktop OS via Tiny Core Linux that was less than 500MB. And that was with a ton of third party apps that didn't ship with the original, internet-capable GUI driven 10MB live image.

The thing is, Windows and Mac OSes have grown larger and larger over the years yet the return via new features isn't matching it. In my experience, OS X has included a lot of great features with each release, especially compared to Windows, but still not nearly enough to warrant the wasted drive space.

No, Apple and Microsoft are trying too hard to shoehorn a full desktop OS experience onto limited devices that don't really need it. Where is the MacBook Air with a touchscreen running iOS? Why not just leave the Surface Pro with RT and slim that OS down some? That's what I'd like to see.